Ripper

by Michael Slade

  Unleashed by a telewarrant under Section 487.1 of the Code, the Mad Dog used “the key to the city” on Ravenscourt’s door. The “key” was a Ram-It II battering ram forty inches long, with handles either side of the fifty-pound tube, electrically nonconductive in case the door was “dirty-tricked.” He and Craven swung the ram at the lock, one, two, three, smash! like hurling a sack of spuds. Waxed by an impact of twenty-four thousand pounds of kinetic force, the door and its frame were torn from the wall. Such a knock the Mounties call a “hard entry.”

  Heckler & Koch MP5 nine-millimeter submachine gun in hand, foregrip squeezed to activate the mounted flashlight, barrel aligned to hit the target centered in its beam, thirty rounds in the magazine in front of the trigger guard, his finger trained to fire semiauto “doubletaps,” two-shot-bursts with one slug on the tail of the other, the Mad Dog entered the mansion through the battered hole.

  He searched it top to bottom.

  There was no one home.

  Ghost Keeper spent his day off snowshoeing in the blizzard high on Seymour Mountain, testing his internal compass and Cree survival techniques. At 3:30 the Staff Sergeant returned to his Jeep and drove down to the city snuggled under a blanket of snow. HQ radioed him on Second Narrows Bridge, and an hour’s hard driving through chaotic streets (West Coast lotus eaters are baffled by snow) got him to Ravenscourt.

  The vine-covered mansion was an Ice Age woolly mammoth, tusklike towers trumpeting the dusk. Forensic hunters had surrounded it with cars, red-and-blue wigwag lights dyeing the white wool. Entering by a hole smashed in the mammoth’s belly, Ghost Keeper wound his way through its guts, from Porte-Cochere to Vestibule to Ballroom, Dining Room, Drawing Room, Smoking Room, Gun Room, Bengal Room, Library, Gallery, Study, Living Room, Conservatory, Pavilion, Gazebo, Morning Room, Kitchen, Servants Hall, Sewing Room, Nursery, Boudoir, Master Bedroom, and six of ten guest rooms until he found DeClercq.

  Ghost Keeper was raised in a one-room shack on an Indian reserve.

  “Sorry to drag you in,” said DeClercq, “but I need your expertise. Ident’s been top to bottom without success. Have a go?”

  Before heading RFISS, Ghost Keeper was a Hairs & Fibres tech, and before that, a Special Constable under the 3(b) Program on the Duck Lake Reserve. There his uncanny ability in hunting fugitives down earned him the nickname “The Tracker” and brought him to the attention of the Crime Detection Lab. His work with Hairs & Fibres saddled him with the additional name “The Human Vacuum Cleaner,” for when he finished combing a scene it was “all in the bag.”

  “Stalkers hunt trophies,” he said.

  Watched by DeClercq, Chan, Craven, and Rabidowski, Ghost Keeper stood on the threshold surveying the Bengal Room. Above the hearth hung a portrait of Angus Craig I, all tweeds, beard, and shotgun, with one hand on his hip and one foot on a bear. The heads of lions, tigers, panthers, pumas, leopards, cheetahs, jaguars, and cougars surrounded him. Staring from the left wall were the faces of baboons, gorillas, orangutangs, and mandrills. The horns of reindeer, caribou, antelope, moose, and elk spiked from the right, while lacquered marlin, swordfish, sawfish, stingrays, and sharks arced around the door. The sofas were unholstered with zebra skin, the neck of a giraffe rising like a potted palm. Stools were made from elephant, rhino, and hippopotamus feet, around serving tables that rode on the backs of turtles, alligators, caymans, and crocs. Light reflecting off the glass of myriad display cases hid their specimens, but from the zeal with which this “sportsman” ravaged Queen Victoria’s Realm, Ghost Keeper wouldn’t be amazed if dragon, unicorn, griffin, yeti, and sasquatch trophies were inside.

  Now he was on the hunt.

  The state in which he entered the room was almost a trance, his eyes those of animal spirits in the primal forest, seeing the room in black and white and hues of gray like them, feeling the room for any sense of recent prey, searching it intuitively until he saw the spot.

  When he crouched beneath the primate faces, the cops gathered around.

  What they saw was a spot of blood on the floor.

  Or rather, half a spot in this room.

  The other half hidden under the baseboard along the wall.

  “Let’s ram it,” the Mad Dog said.

  The chamber hidden behind the secret panel in the wall was another trophy room. A taxidermy table flanked by a projector and screen extended toward a pulpit backed by shelves at the rear. Gouged like juice troughs in a steak board, a pentagram was carved into the scarred wooden surface. Ringbolts looped with cords tipped the four lower points of the star, the fifth point touching the pulpit so anyone tied to the table would form an upside down pentangle.

  The trophies on display within were grimmer than those next door. Seven hell-hags mounted on the walls aimed their talons at the pentagram. The faces on the table were from the biggest game of all: Chloe, Zoe, and Lyric Stamm. The humanhunters had carefully skinned each face from its skull, before smoothing the flesh over a wax mold from the victim. Several coats of varnish preserved the grisly fetishes, three death masks more lifelike than those in Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum.

  The Mounties entered the room.

  Ignoring the snowy, screech, hawk, great horned, great gray, and barn owls, Craven homed in on the recently stuffed northern spotted owl. Parting its feathers, he found the bird’s skin infested with dead Strigiphilus cursor lice.

  DeClercq and Chan stood at the foot of the taxidermy table, facing the pulpit at the far end. Knife marks splintered the wood where the womb of a spread-eagled victim would be. The tabletop was stained from pools and gouts of blood, except for a large rectangle at this end. The oblong was the size of a 19th-century deed-trunk.

  “Viewed from the pulpit, the pentagram is upside down,” said Chan.

  “Symbolizing evil,” said DeClercq. “Like the sign on the Devil Tarot card.”

  “The star carved on Chloe pointed at her feet. If she was on this table, it would point up.”

  “Not if it was meant to point here,” said DeClercq, tapping the blood-free rectangle. “Carved to point at Jack the Ripper’s trunk.”

  “Marsh’s face is missing.”

  “They took it to use on victim five in the Magick Place.”

  “This hellhole’s got to hold a clue to where that is.”

  DeClercq approached the bookshelf behind the devil’s pulpit. A tarnished plaque along its edge read LUCIFER’S LIBRARY. One by one, he withdrew the musty volumes and leafed through pages centuries old. Whoever collected these hellish texts had money to burn, for here was everything from the Malleus Maleficarum, the “hammer of the witches” (1486), to satanic grimoires for conjuring Occult demons: Clavicula Salomonis, the Lemegeton, a German Faustbuch, Tuba Veneris, The Magus, et cetera. Three gaps like missing teeth showed where books were removed, texts DeClercq found open on the wide pulpit.

  Stephenson/D’Onston/Tautriadelta’s first draft of The Patristic Gospels lay to the left. In a chapter excised before publication in 1904, he explained his motive for Jack the Ripper’s crimes and why he turned to God when the Ritual went wrong. A Hanged Man Tarot card bookmarked the volume.

  The text in the center was a 14th-century grimoire titled De Occultus Tarotorum. Two years of high school Latin was insufficient for DeClercq to translate the print, but the hand-drawn illustrations were enough. They were Tarot symbols akin to Waite’s Rider pack, revealing why Jolly Roger used a deck first published twenty-two years after Jack the Ripper’s crimes. A Judgement Tarot card bookmarked the volume.

  The text to the right was a medieval Bible. Also in Latin, it was open to Apocalypsis, Caput XIII. The manuscript was priceless, being centuries old, but someone had run a yellow highlight pen through this passage: 18. Hie sapietia est. Qui habet intellectum, computet numerum bestiae; numerus enim hominis est, et numerus ejus sexcenti sexaginta sex.

  Failed Catholic though he was, DeClercq knew the translation. It was Revelations 13:18: Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the
beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is six hundred threescore and six.

  A Devil Tarot card bookmarked the Bible.

  Standing at the pulpit, DeClercq recalled where the trail began: Jolly Roger quoting Crowley’s story about Vittoria Cremers finding Jack the Ripper’s trunk. When she related the incident to reporter Bernard O’Donnell decades later, Cremers said the trunk contained bloodstained ties and “a few books.” DeClercq knew he was staring at those volumes.

  “Found something, Chief,” Rabidowski said.

  The Mad Dog squatted behind DeClercq, pointing at the shelf beneath Lucifer’s library. The shelf was bare except for a notebook and miniature guillotine. Like the cigar cutter used by Inspector Clouseau’s boss in that Pink Panther film, this tiny blade dropped between two posts to behead a condemned Havana. One post was labeled Skull; the other labeled Crossbones. A newspaper photo of Brigid Marsh advising she’d be guest speaker at “next week’s feminist symposium in Vancouver” was rolled so her head stuck through the beheading hole. Across the photo was scrawled You cored me, cunt.

  The Guillotine was written on the cover of the notebook.

  As DeClercq reached for it, Ghost Keeper flicked a switch on the projector, filling the screen opposite with a jerky black-and-white film.

  … down, down, down the nude procession snakes into the bowels of the grotto where wooden monsters wait … A black trunk squats behind the mounted skulls, faced by seven mummified owls perched on the carvings …

  “The Ripper’s trunk,” said DeClercq. “Passed on by Crowley.”

  … beside the trunk is an iron-barred cage … Something furtive moves within as cowled Death floats through the silent film … Death sheds the robes to expose a man, pale fat sagging his breasts and drooping his belly. His face is masked by the beak and feathers of an owl …

  “An owl cult?” Craven said. “With hell-hags their Doppelgangers?”

  Ghost Keeper stepped into the flickering image as if walking into the cave. “The Magick Place is a Nootka Whalers’ Washing House. Carvings like these were stolen by the Americans. There must be another shrine in Nootka territory.”

  … the owl man bends the flailing woman facedown over the trunk… The Demoniac carves a flesh pentagram into her back. Knife in hand, the Satanist grabs her by the hair, yanking her head back to expose her throat. A blur of steel. An arc of blood. And black and white goes black …

  A loose sheet of paper fell from The Guillotine in DeClercq’s hand. He picked it up as Ghost Keeper switched off the projector. The sheet read:

  DEADMAN’S ISLAND SLEUTHS

  Lou Bolt

  Zinc Chandler

  Sol Cohen

  Luna Darke

  Glen Devlin

  Elvira Franklen

  Stanley Holyoak

  Alexis Hunt

  Al Leech

  Pete Leuthard

  Barney Melburn

  Adrian Quirk

  Colby Smith

  Wynn Yates

  UNTIL THERE ARE NONE

  “Commandeer the chopper,” DeClercq said to Chan.

  MADHOUSE

  Deadman’s Island

  11:05 A.M.

  Zinc cut into Cohen’s chest, working the knife around the bolt barbed in the dead man’s heart. He’d searched the shattered cabinet for missiles to arm the crossbow, but this was the only quarrel in the house. The bolt tore loose from the corpse.

  Not only did Chandler’s head pound like a pile driver gone mad, but he’d sprained his back maneuvering the chair down the cellar steps. They couldn’t leave it in the Library—not with Elvira around—and the only way to separate Wynn was to cut off his head, an indignity Zinc wouldn’t commit. Though he’d never been to war, this must be how it felt: dog eat dog, kill or be killed, and fuck your humanity.

  “Let’s go,” he said to Melburn.

  Crossing from the makeshift morgue to the cellar stairs, wavering candles lighting their way through the subterranean dark, Chandler detoured to the coal bin. Scuffs across the dusty lumps led to the chute from outside, beneath which he found the parka worn by Quirk’s attacker. The hooded man on the bluff had to be Devlin. The others had alibis.

  A person doesn’t vanish into thin air, he thought. If the Turkish bath was sealed so whoever killed Devlin couldn’t get out, the murder weapon has to be a mechanical device. What sort of gadget slits a person’s throat on its own, then disappears? And where does it go?

  The Mountie approached the boiler.

  Though steam pressure still clanked the pipes like Marley’s chains, the fire in the firebox was burning low, the peekaboo door closed to cage the dying orange glow. The floor around the boiler was littered with broken tiles, debris that fell from the steam room above when Melburn cracked the wall to expose the vertical hollow. The pieces had tumbled down the five-inch-square vent, bouncing off the boiler’s top to collect on the ground. The main steampipe ran sideways for three feet, then right-angled up to a ceiling duct where octopus arms reached for the upper floors. The thin secondary pipe that steamed the Turkish bath ran vertically up from the boiler’s top to the hollow niche. The flat top of the boiler was eight feet off the floor.

  “Hand me the spit,” Chandler said, “and watch the other side.” Melburn switched the four-foot rod for Zinc’s candle, then disappeared behind the firebox.

  Raising the spit above his head, the cop swept it across the boiler’s top. When the rod clinked against the vertical pipe, he withdrew it, cleared the obstruction, and swept the other half. Before the swing was finished, something fell to the floor.

  “My side,” Zinc said. “Bring the light around.”

  Both men crouched as the candle glow pooled on the floor.

  What the wavering light revealed was a bloody tape measure.

  Was the clue coincidence? Or Devlin playing games with them? Walking around the bath moments before his throat was slit he’d said, “No way in or out except the wooden door. The structure’s self-contained in the middle of the room. Anyone outside can see the space between its top and the ceiling. You steamed yesterday. See a trapdoor in the floor? If we had a tape measure, bet we’d find the walls no more than eight inches thick. The bath’s a sealed box with a door, a steampipe, and a drain. How the fuck you think I’d use it as a trap?”

  The tongue of the tape measure was transparent and smeared with blood. One edge of the plastic strip was honed as sharp as a razor. Drawing the tape from its container uncoiled a spring inside, which retracted the tongue at lightning speed on release. Except for clear plastic replacing the usual metal blade, the device was a common carpenter’s tool.

  Zinc was thinking aloud.

  “Like the other deathtraps, the razor tape was in place when we arrived. It was hidden, blade withdrawn, in the hollow niche behind the grouted tiles.” He fingered a looped wire affixed to the tip of the tape. “Held in place by something like a transparent cotter pin, this wire protruded into the bath through a small break in the grouting at throat height. The pin was too small to notice in a mist-filled room.

  “Devlin stoked the boiler and turned on the steam, sweating until we returned from the beach. Towel around his waist, he joined us in the Hall, as we responded to the snakepit commotion upstairs. He didn’t return to the bath until we all came down, giving his killer time to set the locked room trap.

  “While we were distracted, someone entered the bath. Using the wire to pull the tape through the break in the grouting, he or she stretched the blade across to the opposite wall. There the killer hooked the wire to the thermometer, before retreating from the bath and Billiards Room.

  “Devlin thought the bath was safe because he didn’t know his partner was after him. Unaware the tape was stretched across the room, he entered the bath and missed the trap in the cloud of steam. The blade was drawn from wall to wall at neck height, so his throat engaged it as he walked in. His forward motion unhooked the wire from the thermometer, freeing the spring to withdraw the tape at eye
-blink speed. The recoiling blade slit Devlin’s throat from ear to ear, the motion similar to a razor slash, so it flicked a bloody cast-off pattern onto the wall. The force of the withdrawal pulled the tape through the grouting, plugging the hole with blood scraped from the blade. A small shelf was glued to the back of one of the tiles. The tape measure balanced precariously on it, with only the wire pinned or hooked inside the bath to keep it from falling. Complete withdrawal of the blade caused it to lose balance and tumble down the hollow, landing on the boiler in the cellar. Us cracking the tiles to reveal the niche destroyed both the chink in the grouting and the shelf behind. The evidence lies broken on the floor around the boiler.”

  “Risky,” Melburn said. “It might have been one of us. Then Devlin would know his partner had it in for him.”

  Chandler shook his head. “Devlin and someone else set this madhouse up. They planned to use the razor tape during the next steam, not this one which was to put us off guard. That’s why Devlin was so cocky taunting me. He thought the bath was benign this time around. Unknown to him, his partner had moved the timetable ahead. Only Devlin lacked an alibi for Quirk, so X knew suspicion would fall on him, and he’d be told to enter the steam room first. We wouldn’t take a chance on it being another trap. Devlin entered, laughing at us, and got caught by the boomerang.”

  “So the Y he scrawled was an X in double cross?”

  “Probably.”

  They made their way from the boiler to the cellar stairs, guttering candles guiding them across the dusty floor. “Strange,” Melburn said. “The dust’s brushed clean of tracks.”